Henry had been hunting in the New Forest when his brother William was killed, and rode at once to Winchester to secure the King’s treasure. As the rights of primogeniture had not yet been established, and he was very obviously a fitter man to be King than his brother Robert, the slight opposition offered by the treasurer was speedily overruled, and the Sunday following (August 5, 1100) he was crowned at Westminster. To secure his position, however, he found it necessary to conciliate all parties. The Church he won by the immediate filling of vacant sees, and by the recall of the exiled Anselm. William Giffard, the chancellor of Rufus, was made Bishop of Winchester; Girard of Hereford, Archbishop of York; while both Norman and Saxon laity were bound to him by a charter, by which he laid some constitutional restrictions upon the despotism established by his father. In that charter he promised to abolish all oppressive duties, and to confine his demands to his just claims as feudal lord; rendering the same agreement obligatory on his tenants towards their vassals. False coining was checked, the right of leaving personal property by will granted, and the law of King Edward, which meant the old institutions of the country, re-established. He likewise thought it well to win the heart of the people by marrying a Princess of English descent, Matilda, niece of Eadgar Ætheling, daughter of Margaret and Malcolm of Scotland. Further to show his disapproval of his brother’s policy, he arrested Ralph Flambard, who, however, found means to escape to Normandy, and was made Bishop of Lisieux.
Henry had thus declared the policy he intended to pursue, the policy of his father rather than of his brother. He meant to be at once a friend and master of the Church, and a national sovereign of the English, a character which became a prince who had been born in that country. That position implied a power much more centralized than that of a feudal suzerain; and in England his chief policy was directed throughout his reign to upholding his mastery over the Church and over refractory barons who aimed at more perfect feudalism. He was in heart however a Norman, and, in pursuit of his objects, did not shrink from using his English subjects with great severity. Similarly, his chief foreign difficulties were produced by his wish to win the Duchy of Normandy, and having won it to rule it in the same masterful spirit in which he ruled England. We find then in his reign ecclesiastical disputes, disputes with the feudal barons of both England and Normandy, wars for the conquest of the duchy, and consequent complications with his suzerain the King of France. Mixed with these are stories, chiefly from Saxon sources, of cruel and unjust exactions and acts of injustice, tolerated, if not ordered, against his Saxon subjects.
His views found supporters in the two sons of that Roger de Beaumont, to whom his father had left the regency of Normandy when he first came to England. These were the two great Earls, Robert, Count of Mellent,[6] afterwards Earl Leicester, and his younger brother Henry, Earl of Warwick, the elder of whom had received no less than ninety-one manors from the Conqueror, and was the most influential and wisest statesman of the day. On the other hand, he was constantly opposed by his brother Robert, a military prince of the feudal type, and Robert de Belesme of the House of Montgomery, possessor of the Earldoms of Alençon in France and of Shrewsbury in England, and by right of marriage of the county of Ponthieu.
Robert heard of his brother’s accession to the throne while on his journey home from the Holy Land. He had served with credit throughout the first crusade, especially at Dorylæum and at Ascalon. He had declined the offer of the crown of Jerusalem, and on his return home had married Sibylla, the daughter of Geoffrey of Conversana. He was a man of extravagant and profligate habits, and speedily squandered the fortune which his wife had brought him, but the entreaties of English exiles, and of those discontented nobles who longed for an easier rule than they could expect from Henry, roused him to assert his claim to the English crown. Robert of Belesme and his brothers, Walter Giffard, Robert Malet, Ivo of Grantmesnil, even William of Warrenne, Earl of Surrey, closely connected with the royal house, joined his party.
But the English were true to the King. Fitz-Hamon, Bigot, and the Earl of Mellent, added their influence to the same side. It was probably chiefly the talents of Mellent, and the threat of excommunication from Archbishop Anselm, which brought about a peaceful solution of the difficulty. A treaty was arranged by which Robert renounced his claims in exchange for the Cotentin and 3000 marks a year. It was also stipulated that a complete amnesty should be extended to the partisans of either prince in his brother’s country. It was not Henry’s intention however to carry out this part of the stipulation, and no sooner had Robert left the country than the King proceeded to take steps against the two leaders of his brother’s faction, Ivo of Grantmesnil and Robert of Belesme. Ivo had been a crusader, and was one of those who had fled from the siege of Antioch, being let down the wall with a rope. He had thus earned the title among the witty Normans of the “Rope-dancer,” and finding his credit gone he withdrew from England. His share in the earldom of Leicester was given to Robert of Mellent, who subsequently acquired the rest of the earldom. Alarmed by these measures of the King, William de Warrenne induced Robert foolishly to come over to England to negotiate for the safety of his partisans. His position there was one of great jeopardy, and he was glad to retire, having renounced his money payment, but having secured the restitution of William in his Earldom of Surrey, of which he had been deprived. The withdrawal of Robert from the contest allowed Henry to turn his undivided attention to the destruction of Robert de Belesme, the head of the Norman party in England. From him he won the castles of Nottingham and Tickhill, and subsequently that of Bridgenorth, to which he had retreated. When many of the barons combined to seek his pardon, Henry, still resting on the support of the English, refused to listen to them, and proceeded to win from him his last stronghold, the Castle of Shrewsbury. Upon this Belesme withdrew with his two brothers into Normandy, and the disaffection of the aristocracy was permanently checked.
It had been stipulated that the brothers should not receive each other’s exiles. In spite of this Robert of Normandy, enraged at the persecution of his partisans, restored to Belesme his continental property. Henry consequently on his side continued his measures against Robert’s partisans. He first banished the Count of Mortain, Earl of Cornwall, who claimed also the Earldom of Kent in succession to Odo of Bayeux, the possession of which would have rendered him the most powerful noble in England, and then proceeded to Normandy to continue his attacks upon Belesme. He alleged not only the reception of his exiles, but the general misgovernment of Robert, as an excuse for his proceedings; and in truth, under that Prince, Normandy had become a scene of anarchy. As an instance of this it is mentioned, that on his arrival a church was pointed out to him full of property sent there for safety from the hands of the marauding barons. He captured the towns of Caen and Bayeux, and found allies in the persistent enemies of the Dukes of Normandy, Fulk Count of Anjou, and Hélie de la Fléche, who had succeeded in regaining the County of Maine. With Count Robert of Flanders also he renewed friendly relations. With such support he proved too strong for the Norman Duke, and before the Castle of Tenchebray a battle was fought, on the anniversary of the battle of Hastings, which ended in favour of the King. Duke Robert himself, the Count of Mortain, and Eadgar Ætheling, who had been serving with the Duke, were taken prisoners. Eadgar was liberated, and died in peace in England some years after; but Duke Robert and the Count of Mortain were imprisoned for the rest of their lives. Normandy and England were thus again united.
The possession of Normandy brought Henry into more immediate contact with France. Louis VI. was upon the throne of that kingdom, the first of those great kings to whom the monarchy owed its ultimate triumph over feudalism. It was natural that he should look with jealousy on the vast strength of his great vassal, and should attempt to curtail that power which the supineness of his predecessor had allowed to accumulate. A constant border warfare was the consequence, rendered the more possible by the doubtful position of such counties as Maine, Evreux, the Vexin, Blois, and Alençon, the counts of which were for ever changing their allegiance. Louis had no difficulty in finding a pretender to the Norman Duchy whom he might use as his instrument in opposing the English King. William, the son of Robert, had fallen into Henry’s hands, and had been by him intrusted to the care of Hélie de St. Saen. In 1110, in connection apparently with a movement of disaffected nobility (for Braiose, Malet, and Bainard are mentioned as being exiled at that time), Hélie fled with the young Prince, and sought to raise all the neighbouring princes in his cause. Their efforts were not successful. Henry’s arch-enemy, Robert of Belesme, fell into the King’s hands at Bonneville, where he had presented himself with extraordinary effrontery, trusting that a message with which he was charged from the King of France would give him the security due to an ambassador. The same year Theobald of Blois, acting for Henry, defeated the French King at Puysac. And when Henry himself succeeded in capturing the town of Alençon, and in attaching the Count of Anjou to his interests, by giving him his heir, William the Ætheling, as a husband for his daughter, Louis found it desirable to conclude a peace at Gisors, by which he resigned his claim of suzerainty over Maine, Belesme, and Brittany, and left entirely unmentioned the rights of William, son of Robert. There followed a period of some years, during which Henry was able to live in tolerable peace in England.
His position was, indeed, unusually strong. His son was contracted to the daughter of the Earl of Anjou; his natural daughter to Conan, son of Alan Fergant of Brittany; and, in the following year, his daughter Adelaide or Matilda was married to the German Emperor Henry V. He took this opportunity of securing the succession to his son William, to whom, in the years 1115-1116, he succeeded in inducing the barons both of England and Normandy to promise their allegiance. But this cessation of hostilities was not of long duration.
The causes of war had not been removed. There was still chronic disaffection among the Norman barons, who disliked the firmness of Henry’s rule; constant jealousy upon the part of the French King; and the Pretender William, the Clito as he is called, was an ever-ready instrument for their hands. Thus the border warfare was renewed, and we hear of the disaffection, not only of the King’s great barons, but of his allies, both Robert of Flanders and Fulk of Anjou adopting William’s cause. Other distresses likewise came upon Henry. He lost his wife Matilda, and his firm and sagacious minister, Robert of Mellent. But, in 1118, prosperity again returned to him. The Count of Flanders was killed in an attack upon the Count of Eu. Money or negotiation won back the friendship of Fulk, and in the following year a battle between a few knights at Brenneville, at which both Henry and Louis were present in person, was regarded as so decisive a victory for the English, that, by the mediation of Pope Calixtus, a new Treaty was arranged, and William’s interest completely disregarded. Thus was triumphantly closed the second of Henry’s wars in France.
At this period of his greatest prosperity a blow fell upon Henry from which he is said never to have recovered. He was returning in triumph to England, when a certain Thomas Fitz-Stephen, whose father had conveyed the Conqueror to England, claimed the privilege of conveying the royal party. To gratify him, Prince William, with the king’s natural daughter Matilda, the Countess of Perche, and other young nobles, consented to embark in his ship called the “Blanche Nef.” They remained behind the rest of the fleet and celebrated the occasion in festivity, which ended in the drunkenness of the crew. As they rode upon the harbour of Barfleur in the moonlight they suddenly struck upon the rocks of the Ras de Catte, and there was barely time for the young Prince to escape in a boat from the sinking ship. The cries of his sister are said to have induced William to return towards the wreck, when the hurried rush of the despairing crew capsized his boat, and all on board were drowned. Of the whole crew of the ship one only, Berold, a butcher of Rouen, survived, owing his safety to the warmth afforded him by his rough garb of undressed sheepskins. With fear and trembling the news was broken to Henry by the young son of Count Theobald of Blois. Henry is said to have fallen fainting from his seat, and from that time onwards never to have relaxed into a smile.
The death of Prince William was not only a domestic misfortune. By it was broken also the tie which bound the Count of Anjou to Henry’s interests. It was a natural jealousy of his great neighbour, the Norman Duke, which had induced Fulk to act in alliance with Henry. When Robert’s imprisonment put Henry on the throne of Normandy, he in turn became the object of Fulk’s enmity. The state of the Duchy, where a disaffected party constantly existed, afforded him ample opportunity of giving effect to that enmity. Thus, in 1124, Henry was again recalled to Normandy to suppress a rebellion in favour of William Clito, who was supported by Anjou. Not only Anjou but France was inclining to join the rebels, and it was only by instigating his son-in-law the Emperor to attack France that Henry could manage to make head against his opponents. As it was, however, a fortunate surprise by which all the leaders fell into his hands enabled him to crush the rebellion, and again induced the foreign powers to desert William. The King of France indeed did not wholly give him up; but in 1127, after investing him with several important territories, he brought him forward as a claimant to the throne of Flanders, to which he had a claim through his grandmother, Matilda, the Conqueror’s wife, who was a daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders. Against him Henry supported the claims of Diederik or Dirk, Count of Alsace, the last count’s nephew, and his rightful heir. The matter came to war, and in July 1128, before Alost, Prince William was wounded, and died of his wounds. Henry was thus rid of his most formidable opponent.
It remained for him to secure the succession for his daughter Matilda, and he induced all the great men of England to acknowledge her, and swear to support her claims. The list of those who swore was headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the King’s nephew, Stephen of Boulogne, and his natural son, Robert of Gloucester. They always declared that they accepted the oath on the condition that she should not be married to a foreigner without their consent, and therefore many of them held themselves absolved from their oath, when she was betrothed and ultimately married to Geoffrey, son of the Count of Anjou.
The close of his reign was chiefly occupied in arranging disputes in consequence of this marriage. It was while still in Normandy on this business, though his presence was imperatively demanded in England to suppress an insurrection in Wales, that he died, as it is said, of the effects of a hearty meal of lampreys on the 1st of December 1135.
Throughout the reign he had had considerable difficulties with the Welsh, for although, as has been said, many Norman knights and barons had established strongholds among them, they were by no means subdued. They took part in the insurrection of Robert of Belesme; and Henry, conscious that they would be difficult to conquer, hit upon the plan of establishing among them colonies of Flemings, many of whom had come over with the Conqueror, and still more about the year 1106, driven from their country by inundations. The land granted them was in the western part of Wales, near Haverfordwest and Tenby, where they acted at once as a military post, and, through their knowledge of manufacture and agriculture, as an instrument of civilization. In 1114 the Welsh rose under Gryffith. The occupation of Caermarthen and Cardigan, where Gilbert Strongbow, Earl of Strigul, was at that time commanding, separated the Flemings from the English, and Henry was compelled to march to their rescue. This insurrection was suppressed by Robert of Gloucester, himself the son of Gryffith’s sister.[7] Small insurrections continued. In 1122 Henry again went in person to Wales, but, on the whole, the inhabitants were kept in subjection by the Flemings and by numerous Norman castles till 1134, when they were provoked to a new outbreak, so important that the King was preparing to cross from Normandy to suppress it, when he died.
At home the great points of Henry’s reign were those which form the domestic history of all feudal monarchies, the relation of the Church and State, and the maintenance of police. With regard to the Church his views were those of his father. He was ready to support and increase its influence; he was not ready to give up any of the prerogatives which his predecessors had possessed. He thus reversed all the action of his brother, recalled Anselm at once with marked honour, and filled up the vacant benefices. But the Archbishop during his exile had mixed in Continental politics, at that time consisting almost entirely of the question of investitures. He returned home determined to assert to the full the independence of the Church. He therefore refused to swear fealty, and do homage to the King, or to consecrate those bishops who had received their investitures from him. Henry, supported by his lay counsellors, was equally determined to uphold the rights of the crown. The matter was referred to the Pope, Pascal II. The Papacy had enemies enough already, and could not afford to drive to extremities a Prince so powerful, and in the main so friendly, as Henry. The reply which was returned was ambiguous. Henry again commanded the Archbishop to perform his usual duties. A second application to Rome produced no better result. Anselm was urged to perseverance. Henry’s ambassadors were given to understand that, as long as his appointments were good, the King should not be interfered with. Firm in his own views, but uncertain as to the Pope’s wishes, Anselm had no course open to him but to visit Rome in person. He there met with but lukewarm support, and withdrew to Lyons, while Henry laid hands upon all the revenues of the archbishopric. For some time Anselm rejected all offers of compromise; but when, after all his efforts, he could induce the Pope to go no further than the excommunication, not of the King, but of some of his ministers, he lost heart, and, in 1106, a compromise was arranged at Bec, by which Henry retained the really important part of investiture, the oaths of fealty and homage, while resigning the idle symbol of the gift of ring and crozier. This compromise, which was the same in effect as that made sixteen years afterwards at Worms between Henry V. and Calixtus II., set at rest for the present that rivalry between Church and State which the policy of the Conqueror had introduced. The decrees of a Synod held at Westminster, 1102, by Anselm before going to Rome, show the abuses which the ecclesiastical disputes of the last reign had introduced. They are directed against such habits as simony, marriage of the clergy, the assumption of lay dress by ecclesiastics, the holding of secular courts by bishops, the adoration of unauthorized saints and relics, and vindicate the claims of the Church to be considered as the chief civilizing agent of the time by forbidding the selling of men for slaves.
It was not always that the Church appeared in such an amiable light. Henry no doubt, on the whole, attempted to make good appointments, but interest or desire to reward an ardent partisan sometimes put an unfit person into office. Thus Henry of Poitou was given the Abbey of Peterborough, although he already held an abbey in France, apparently as a reward for the support he gave the King in upholding the illegality of the marriage between William Clito and Sibylla of Anjou on the score of consanguinity. “He came like a drone to a hive,” says the chronicler; “all that the bees draw towards them the drones devour and draw from them, so did he.” It is fair to say that Henry, when he found out how bad a person he had appointed, had him removed. “It was not very long after that that the King sent for him, and made him give up the Abbey of Peterborough, and go out of the land.” Thus, again, after a great distribution of abbeys in 1107, it is remarked “that the abbots were rather wolves than shepherds.” Such complaints are however usually uttered by English writers, and the plight of the conquered people was evidently very miserable.
It was a time of great suffering on more accounts than one, and the suffering was of a kind to fall chiefly upon the lower orders. Agriculture was so rough that any little irregularity in the seasons produced a failure of the crops, and the habits of the people were such that any infectious disease was liable to become a pestilence. The constant warfare, either against his vassals or his enemies, which the King carried on, was the cause of frequent taxation, against which no class in the State had it in their power to remonstrate; while the natural and artificial causes of suffering were further aggravated by the frequent issue of false coin. Thus we find year after year such entries as these in the chroniclers:—“The year 1105 was very miserable, because of the failure of the crops, and the ceaseless taxation.” “The year 1110 was full of wretchedness, because of the bad season, and the tribute the King demanded for his daughter’s dowry.” “In this year (1124) were many failures in England in corn and all fruit, so that between Christmas and Candlemas the acre seed of wheat was sold for six shillings; and that of barley, that is three seedlips for three shillings, the acre seed of oats for four shillings, because there was little corn, and the penny was so bad that a man who had at market a pound could by no means buy therewith twelvepenny-worth.” “In this same year (1125) was so great a flood on St. Lawrence’s mass day that many towns and men were drowned, and bridges shattered; corn and meadows totally destroyed, and for all fruits there was so bad a season as there had not been for many years before.” “In that year (1131) there was so great a murrain of cattle as never was in the memory of man.” This carried off neat, swine, and domestic fowls alike. And when the harvest was good the pestilence came. “This year (1112) was a very good year, and very abundant in wood and field, but it was a very sorrowful one through a most destructive pestilence.” Or again, the year 1104, “It is not easy to recount all the miseries the country suffered this year through various and manifold illegalities and imposts which never ceased nor failed, and ever as the King went there was plundering by his followers on his wretched people, and at the same time often burnings and murders.”
In these extracts, which might be largely multiplied, the chief causes of the people’s misery are mentioned. Heavy taxes, famines, floods, pestilence, false money, and purveyance. To attempt to rectify such of these as were within the power of man, was one main part of Henry’s duty. To that was added the work of suppressing, by a centralized royal power, the excesses of the feudal barons. What crying necessity there was that they should be suppressed is made plain by the stories related of Robert of Belesme, their chief. He is spoken of as guilty of the most unheard-of barbarities, as having scorned the ransoms of his captives to torture them by newfangled instruments; he found delight in seeing men and women impaled and struggling in the agonies of death. “He was a man,” says William of Malmesbury, “intolerable for the barbarity of his manners, remarkable besides for cruelty;” and, among other instances, he relates how, on account of some trifling fault of its father, he blinded his godchild, who was his hostage, by tearing out the poor little creature’s eyes with “his accursed nails.”
One complaint of his people Henry systematically disregarded. He could not afford to do without his taxes, and on all classes on this point he leant with a heavy hand. But in other respects, as far as in him lay, he rectified abuses of administration, and established a vigorous and effectual police. The evils of purveyance had become extreme; no property was safe from the hands of the followers of the court, and when they found larger supplies than they wanted, “if it was liquor they washed their horses’ feet in it, or food they wantonly destroyed it.” But Henry made a regulation for the followers of his court, at whichever of his residences he might be, stating what they should take without payment from the country folk, and how much, and at what price they should purchase, punishing the transgressors by heavy fine or loss of life. So with regard to false coinage, immediately after the complaint of high prices in the year 1124, it is mentioned that Henry at once sent from Normandy to England, and commanded that all the moneyers should have their right hands cut off, and be otherwise mutilated. Bishop Roger of Salisbury sent all over England, commanded them all to come before him, and then and there punished upwards of fifty. Henry was careful, indeed, in other ways with regard to the money, having the whole of the coinage broken to prevent the refusal of broken silver pennies; for it seems to have been the custom to break the coinage to see that the money was good, and tradesmen not unfrequently refused the broken coins.
Against offences of violence Henry was equally vigorous. At one single court held in Leicestershire by Basset the Justiciary, during the King’s absence in 1124, no less than forty-four thieves were condemned and hanged, besides others mutilated. “He sought after robbers and counterfeiters with the greatest diligence, and punished them when discovered,” says William of Malmesbury. Rivalling his father also in other respects, he restrained by edict the acts of his courtiers, thefts, rapine, and the violation of women, commanding the delinquents to be deprived of sight. He also displayed singular vigilance against the mint masters, suffering no man who had been guilty of “deluding the innocent by the practice of roguery” to escape without losing his hands. “A good man he was,” says the Saxon Chronicle, “and all men stood in awe of him; no man durst misdo against another in his time. He made peace for man and beast. Whoso bare his burden of gold and silver, no man thirst do him aught but good.”
To carry out this strict police some apparatus was necessary, which at the same time should serve the purpose of diminishing the power of the great nobles, and that of beginning at all events, by its centralizing influence, to re-form the conquered people and their conquerors into one nation. The rudiments of such an apparatus Henry found already existing in the arrangements which the Conqueror had made. The system of frankpledge, increased and adapted to the more general feudal form of society, supplied him with an efficient system of police. There was no man in the kingdom but some one was answerable for him. If he was a vassal, his lord. If he was a freeman, the knot of freemen of which he was a member. As courts to carry out this system, there were the old Hundred and Shire gemots. These Henry strengthened and, it would seem from one existing order, restored when in any way decayed to their original purity. To these courts criminal cases belonged, and civil suits between vassals of different lords. Questions between vassals of the same lord seem to have fallen within the jurisdiction of the lord. But these inferior courts, although they were excellent for police purposes, and as a check upon the powers of the baronial courts, would have done little towards the formation of nationality had they not been brought into connection with a superior court of which the king was chief. This central court consisted of the King in his ordinary council, which, since the Conquest, was known as the Curia Regis. Over it was the justiciary, who was the King’s representative, his regent during his absence, the head of his administration, both judicial and financial, at all times. Under him was a selection of barons, the chief officers of the royal household, and those best qualified for judicial purposes. The clerks of this court were placed under a head, who was the chancellor. The judges themselves sat for financial purposes in the exchequer chamber, and were spoken of as the barons of the exchequer. For general business they were called justices, and their head the chief-justice. The organization of this court dates from the reign of Henry I. The office of chief justiciary had been founded by William the Conqueror, but the regular formation of the Exchequer Court was the work of Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, in the hands of whose family the direction of the machinery remained for nearly a century.[8] It was afterwards, as we shall see, brought to its completion by Henry II., but all its essential parts are to be found in the reign of his grandfather. It was as officers of finance that the justices first began to traverse the country. The sheriffs could not always be trusted in their own localities, and change of property and other causes gave rise to difficult questions, requiring to be settled by the immediate intervention of the King’s officers. From financial questions their authority naturally passed to questions of justice, and their connection with the local courts was further strengthened when Henry united several sheriffdoms under one of his justices. Following a natural tendency, the men employed for these offices were not the great barons, but new men, who rose by their talents, and were naturally upholders of the royal power and of order in opposition to the anarchical baronial party.
To sum up; after the year 1108, when the local courts were re-established, both the Hundred and county courts were the same in constitution and in arrangement as before the Conquest. But they were connected with the central government; because matters in which the King was interested were set aside for the consideration of the Curia Regis, or travelling justiciary sent out from that body; and because the Norman lawyers had introduced the practice of issuing writs from the King’s court, whereby the King, in virtue of what is called his “equitable power,” that is, his power of securing justice where the law did not give it, prescribed the method of action in certain difficult cases. The Hundred court was sometimes a lower court for the arrangement of small debts; the Bailiff of the Hundred then presided. Sometimes it was the great court held only twice a year; the sheriff then presided, the court exercised criminal jurisdiction, and was known as the “Court Leet.” It also saw to the filling up of the divisions of ten men required by the system of Frankpledge; this was called “the view of frankpledge.” The court was then known as “the Sheriff’s Tourn.” Below these local courts were the feudal manor courts, the old motes of the township, now become the courts of the lord. But we must not suppose that the authority of the sheriff and the local courts (now virtually royal courts) was universal. Certain great lords enjoyed franchises, that is, exercised jurisdiction over several manors. If the lord had “sac and soc,” his court had the authority of the Court Leet. If he had “the view of frankpledge,” the suitors at his court were free from attendance at the Sheriff’s Tourn. His court was then in all points like the Hundred court, but independent of the sheriff. This double system Henry had apparently to submit to, watching the baronial power as well as he could, by means of the local courts and travelling justices.
It is to be carefully remembered that though the Curia Regis, representing the King’s council, attested charters, and revised and registered laws, it had no legislative authority. Both the imposition of taxes and the making of laws still rested with the King and his great council, the representative of the Witan, which had become a feudal court, and consisted chiefly of the King’s vassals. Their “counsel and consent” was a necessary condition of all legislation.